One thing to keep in mind is that libraries and archives have been budget starved for decades. You can often get a grant to acquire or digitize something but fewer donors are interested in paying lawyers to evaluate copyright exposure, which leads to conservative policies.
All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this situation - it’s not a job you take if you don’t want people to access things – but that tends to translate into requests for copyright exemptions.
A really big one is orphan works where they have things like digitized music which can’t even be linked to a known copyright holder because it’s unclear who owns it after decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues track from 1952 which they don’t even offer for sale any more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to availability for mainstream sale: say that there’s no charge for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play, Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren’t available.
All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this situation - it’s not a job you take if you don’t want people to access things – but that tends to translate into requests for copyright exemptions.
A really big one is orphan works where they have things like digitized music which can’t even be linked to a known copyright holder because it’s unclear who owns it after decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues track from 1952 which they don’t even offer for sale any more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to availability for mainstream sale: say that there’s no charge for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play, Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren’t available.